I have a cellular internet card that I use in my MacBook Pro (thanks work!). If I wanted to (not sure about the terms of use), I could turn my laptop into a wireless access point. OSX makes this trivial to do. It is just:
System Preferences -> Sharing -> internet
I can name my Mac-as-Wifi-hotspot anything I want, like Linksys or TMobile Hotspot, or concourse, or hhonors, or any of the other plethora of common network names that frequent travelers may have accepted as a known network. My question is how many iPhones would hop on my network without their owners ever knowing (b/c who the hell would join “linksys” in the airport?). If those iPhones hopped on the network, would they begin check email at regular intervals, passing the password in clear text?
Granted, this is a problem with laptops as well, but I assume people whose laptops are checking email in the airport tend to know what network they are on. The iPhone seems like it could be particularly dangerous since I would imagine this could all take place in someone’s pocket without them ever knowing (from my very limited understanding).
Surely, if this was the case it would be a big story already. Can anyone confirm or deny this behavior? Should I test it at DFW this week? Or maybe I should test it at some of the biggest airports in the country over the next month. I think I will be at DFW, ORD, DCA, LGA, and SFO in that time.
Update: After reading an article on iPhones flooding Duke’s wireless network I think I have a pretty good guess at what is going on:
- The good news is that iPhones will not join an ‘evil twin’ network just because the network name is the same as one you trust.
- The way they are doing this is to retain the IP/MAC addresses of the WiFi access point with that name.
- When a known network name comes into range, the iPhone pings the “known” IP address of that network name to check the MAC address.
- That IP address may or may not exist on that network.
- The easy way to test this is see if an iPhone asks for you to approve each TMobile hotspot (or something similar) you go to.
Any further information (pro or con) would be of interest to my curiosity.
